Letters From Some Island - Poems by Anne Marriot

Anne Marriott was one of Canada’s most accomplished poets and writers. She received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and her work is widely anthologized. Her works, The Circular Coast: Poems New and Selected(Mosaic Press, 1981) and A Long Way to Oregon: Selected Short Stories (Mosaic Press, 1984) reaffirm her standing as a major literary figure.

She was born in Victoria in 1913 and educated in private schools there. She was a founder, with Dorothy Livesay, Floris McLaren, Doris Ferne and Alan Crawley, of the modernist literary magazine, Contemporary Verse, in Victoria in 1941. Marriott produced 8 collections of poetry in all, four of them between 1939 and 1945, and the remainder after 1971. During the intervening years she worked as journalist and produced radio documentaries for use in schools, while raising a family of three children. Marriott won the Governor General’s Award for Calling Adventurers! in 1941. She lived for periods of time in Squamish, Prince George and Vancouver, and lived the greater part of her life in North Vancouver, where she died in 1997.